Richard Reed Parry's Quartet For Heart And Breath for mixed Ensemble.Quartet for Heart And Breath was commissioned for Kronos Quartet by the 2009 MusicNOW Festival. The mixedEnsemble arrangement was premiered by yMusic.Instrumentation: Flute Clarinet in Bb Trumpet in Bb Violin Viola Violoncello and Double Bass (optional).'This piece is based around the idea of using the widelyvarying internal rhythms of the performers? bodies as performance parameters. There is no actual tempo or meter built into the piece. The breathing rates of the players are used in alternation with the individual performers? heartrates to determine the pace at which all of the musical material is played. This requires that the performers generally play quietly and delicately with little or no vibrato so as to be able to hear their heartbeats adequately.This in combination with thenatural variance between the different heart rates results in a kind of delicate musical ?pointillism?: starts and stops which are somewhat staggered parts which repeatedly line up and fall out ofsync with each other different individuals? pulses rising and falling. The piece is never performed exactly the same way twice.The performers wear stethoscopes positioned over their hearts so that each can follow his orher own heart rate. Two eighth notes/quavers correspond to the two sounds of a normal heartbeat and performers should match as closely as possible the staccato and irregular rhythm they hear. When instructed to ?play to breath? the natural cycle of one inhalation and one exhalation or vice versa will determine the length of the bar (two quarter notes/crotchets) without any attempt to make it metronomic. For wind players this means that the phrase isextended to encompass the whole of their natural breath without straining to hold for as long as possible. When one instrument is designated the leader their breath will determine the starts of phrases and the procession from